Abstract This work presents a detailed analysis of the gravitational collapse of a shear-free radiating, spherically symmetric imperfect fluid. The interior spacetime, characterized by dissipative and anisotropic pressure processes, is matched to an exterior Vaidya spacetime. We choose forms of the gravitational potentials which generalize earlier well known models yielding new dynamical effects. The matter variables are well behaved and a horizon does not form for the linear form of the temporal behaviour of the potential. The role of gravitational complexity is studied. We find that complexity plays a central role in the collapse process and influences the evolution of anisotropy, inhomogeneous processes and dissipative effects. Notably we find that profiles of the matter variables are similar to complexity early in the evolution of the star but their magnitudes grow appreciably as the collapse proceeds.
Majozi et al. (2025) studied this question.